Tzuyu

30-second overview: Tzuyu (周子瑜) was born in Tainan in 1999 and left home at 13 to become a JYP trainee. Forty-seven days after her debut, she held a Republic of China flag on Korean TV for 8 seconds — the moment was screencapped by Chinese netizens. Two months later, a 90-second apology video was released on the eve of Taiwan's presidential election. Scholars estimated that video influenced the voting decisions of 1.34 million young voters¹. From that point forward she never said a single word about those 90 seconds — she just kept dancing, kept releasing albums, kept serving as lead dancer and maknae in TWICE. Ten years later she finally came back to Kaohsiung and, before 55,000 people, read aloud from a handwritten letter: "I didn't leave — not because I was obedient or compliant, but because I truly wanted and longed to stay." The whole arena wept with her.

On the evening of January 15, 2016, a 16-year-old girl from Tainan sat in a JYP Entertainment studio in Korea, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a sheet of paper in her hands. She looked into the camera and read out 90 seconds in a trembling voice, her gaze blank: "There is only one China. The two sides of the strait are one. I have always felt proud to be Chinese."²

The next day was the presidential election in Taiwan. Tsai Ing-wen won with 6.89 million votes, becoming the first female president.³

The South China Morning Post later cited poll figures: those 90 seconds influenced the voting decisions of 1.34 million young voters¹; scholar Fan Shih-ping estimated the "apology" contributed between 1 and 2 percentage points to Tsai Ing-wen's margin of victory⁴.

Her name is Chou Tzu-yu (Tzuyu). From that night on, she never said a single word about those 90 seconds.

But she also did not disappear. For the next ten years she continued to stand at the center of K-pop's brightest stages — dancing "Cheer Up," "TT," and "LIKEY" in TWICE; being voted the world's most beautiful face; accumulating over 10 million Instagram followers; releasing a solo EP; earning a master's degree from a European university. Every time she appeared she explained nothing — and every time she appeared, people thought of those 90 seconds.

Until ten years later, when she finally came back to Kaohsiung and brought out another handwritten page. What was on it this time was entirely different.

The Girl Who Danced at Fusing Elementary

Tzuyu is from Tainan, born June 14, 1999. Her father Chou Yi-cheng has run a cosmetics business for over 20 years; her mother Huang Yen-ling is the CEO of "Top Beauty Girl," an aesthetic medicine clinic chain with locations in Taichung, Kaohsiung, and Tainan⁵. She grew up soft-spoken, fond of singing and dancing. For primary school she attended Fusing Elementary School in Tainan's East District — the school that, at its 30th anniversary celebration in 2024, inadvertently publicized something she had never mentioned herself⁶.

In 2012, she participated in a showcase presented by the Muse Performing Arts Workshop. A grainy video of the performance was spotted by a JYP Entertainment scout, who then phoned her family and asked whether the girl would be willing to fly to Korea for an audition.

She was 13.

Did you know?
JYP trainees average 14–16 years of age, but 13 is an exceptionally early entry point — no shared language, no family nearby, 8–10 hours of daily training, the constant possibility of elimination. This is one of the most punishing entry points in the K-pop industry. Tzuyu's trainee period ran three full years (November 2012 – October 2015)⁷, an entire adolescence spent in Seoul.

When she announced at Fusing Junior High that she was going to Korea, classmates who liked her organized a camping farewell party⁵. On November 15 she landed at Gimpo Airport. From that day on, her life became: language classes during the day, dance training at night, arriving back at the dormitory exhausted, doing stretches before she could sleep⁷.

Forty-Seven Days In

In 2015, JYP ran the Mnet survival show SIXTEEN to select the founding 9-member lineup for TWICE. Tzuyu was not originally among the final 9. But audiences were overwhelmingly taken with her, and after filming wrapped, founder Park Jin-young decided to add Tzuyu and another Japanese member MOMO — expanding TWICE from 9 to 11 members⁵.

On October 20, TWICE's debut album THE STORY BEGINS was released⁵. Forty-seven days later, the story was interrupted by a flag.

On November 21, 2015, Tzuyu appeared on the Korean MBC variety show My Little Television. The host asked each member to introduce their home country; she picked up a Republic of China flag. The camera lingered on her for approximately 8 seconds². Nothing about the moment felt remarkable at the time, and the footage generated no immediate controversy.

For two full months, nothing happened.

Curator's Note
Two months. From November 21, 2015 — the moment she waved the flag — until January 8, 2016, when Huang An posted about it on Weibo, two entire months passed with no one paying attention. If Huang An had not scrolled across that clip that day; if the Chinese government had not at that precise moment been inviting TWICE to perform at the Spring Festival Gala; if the incident had not fallen one week before Taiwan's presidential election — this "event" would never have existed. But history does not accept "if."

That One Weibo Post

On January 8, 2016, a Taiwanese entertainer named Huang An (黃安) posted a screengrab on Sina Weibo accusing Tzuyu of "promoting Taiwan independence" and calling on netizens to boycott her⁸.

Who is Huang An? Born Huang Hung-ming, his career in Taiwan collapsed in the late 1990s amid controversies, feuds with other entertainers, and eventual exclusion by the media — after which he relocated to China with his family⁹. In China, he rebuilt himself as someone who "reports Taiwan independence by name," and in 2015 filed a named report against a Taiwanese netizen named Zhong Yu-chen with the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, receiving public "respect and thanks" from the TAO in response.

That Weibo post about Tzuyu detonated Chinese netizens' anti-independence sentiment. At the time, Chinese state media was in the process of inviting TWICE to perform at the Spring Festival Gala — within a single night, TWICE's advertising endorsements were cancelled, the Gala appearance was scrapped, and every one of Tzuyu's personal endorsements disappeared⁸. JYP Entertainment issued a first statement on the night of January 14 declaring that Tzuyu "firmly supports and respects the One China principle"². Taiwanese public opinion exploded.

At 10 p.m. on January 15, the second statement arrived. This time it was not text — it was a video.

Those 90 Seconds

✦ "There is only one China. The two sides of the strait are one. I have always felt proud to be Chinese."

She was in a black turtleneck, no makeup, a blank gaze, the paper in her hands shaking². The 90-second video became the biggest news story of the final 24 hours of Taiwan's 2016 presidential campaign.

That night, PTT, Facebook, and Twitter all exploded. Young people said the footage looked like "a terrorist forcing a hostage to read a statement." People started posting their ROC national ID cards on Facebook alongside a single line: "I am Taiwanese. This is my identity."

The next day — January 16 — was presidential election day. Tsai Ing-wen won with 6.89 million votes, becoming the first female president³. In her victory address that night, she said what would go on to be quoted for years:

"As long as I am president, I will work so that not one of my citizens will ever need to apologize for their identity."³

1.34 Million Young People Who Changed Their Minds

In the months after the election, the South China Morning Post tracked a figure: 1.34 million — the estimated number of young voters who changed their voting decisions because of the Tzuyu incident. Some had never intended to vote at all and went out the next day after watching those 90 seconds; some had planned to vote KMT and switched to DPP; some had been undecided, and this pushed them¹.

A Taiwan Thinktank poll indicated the incident influenced approximately one-tenth of ballots cast³. Scholar Fan Shih-ping assessed that the apology had "a direct and significant impact on the 2016 presidential election"⁴. Academic journals later published a dedicated analysis, "The politics of apology: The Tzuyu Scandal," examining the incident through the framework of transnational K-pop dynamics¹⁰. At the time, The Economist's cover story read: "This is the first time Chinese nationalism has bitten back against K-pop. A 16-year-old girl became the center of a three-way political game."

But the center of the story never opened her mouth. Tzuyu herself, her father, her mother — the family's response to those 90 seconds of 2016 has always been the same answer. In 2018, when another Taiwanese entertainer Song Yuhua sparked a similar controversy in China over identifying as Chinese, a journalist tracked down Tzuyu's mother Huang Yen-ling for comment. She said:

"I'm sorry, I don't talk about political matters."¹¹

That has been this family's standard answer for every political question.

Points of Dispute
Was the Tzuyu incident coincidence or conspiracy? No definitive conclusion exists. One camp holds it was a spontaneous action by Chinese nationalist netizens, with Huang An merely being the one who lit the match; another argues the timing was too precise (occurring one week before the election) to rule out political engineering. The Chinese side holds the incident was over-politicized by Taiwanese media. Whatever the cause, the outcome is clear: it changed an election.

From "Cheer Up" to "Fancy": The Person Chosen as the Face

In April 2016, TWICE released their second mini-album PAGE TWO; the lead single "Cheer Up" swept the Gaon chart, taking Song of the Year at the Mnet Asian Music Awards by year's end¹². Three months after the flag incident, Tzuyu had not been taken back by the Chinese market — she and TWICE had instead used the song to become one of the hottest girl groups in all of Korea.

Within TWICE, she serves as lead dancer, sub-vocalist, and maknae. "Maknae" (막내) is Korean for the youngest member, but her groupmates observed that Tzuyu was calm, precise in speech, and used Korean at a level more polished than members older than her — leading them to say she was actually "the one in the group who feels most like the eldest sister"⁵. They gave her a nickname: Yoda, for her round, wide eyes and prominent ears.

In October 2016, TWICE released their third mini-album TWICEcoaster: LANE 1; the lead single "TT" held the top position on Gaon for four consecutive weeks, and the "TT crying dance" became a meme mimicked by teenagers across Asia¹². Within one year, TWICE went from a new group to one of K-pop's three dominant girl groups.

2017 was the year Tzuyu became famous beyond the fandom. On January 30 at the Korean Idol Star Athletics Championships, TWICE entered the archery event. Tzuyu stepped up to the line, drew the bow, released — the bowstring caught her long hair, the arrow missed — but the motion was so beautiful that the footage surpassed one million views within 24 hours¹³. Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi shared the GIF; Spy Kids director Paul Feig shared it too. Eight years later, the clip is still circulating in Indian social media¹³.

Curator's Note
That archery moment is the metaphor for Tzuyu's entire career: she didn't hit the target, but her posture was so beautiful everyone remembered it. Ten years later she told the world through a handwritten letter that she had long wondered whether she even belonged there. But when this world looked at her, all it ever saw was the moment she drew the bow.

In November 2017, TWICE appeared on NHK's Kōhaku Uta Gassen — the first Korean group invited in 6 years¹². That same year, TWICE's first full album Twicetagram, led by the single "LIKEY," again swept the charts. "What is Love?" in 2018, "Fancy" in 2019 — each became a textbook K-pop reference for Asian girl groups.

The American film website TC Candler publishes an annual "100 Most Beautiful Faces" list. Tzuyu appeared on the list from 2015 (ranked 13th), appearing every year thereafter, and in 2019 reached 1st place — the first Asian woman in the list's history to reach number one¹⁴.

She was famous. And she did not open her mouth.

The First Time Anyone Heard Her Talk About Herself

In April 2019, Tzuyu posted a long English text on her newly launched Instagram. She said she "had been thinking about many things lately," told fans "you can't make everyone like you — there will always be people in the world who dislike you for no reason, and that's normal," and told them to "remember who you are, remember the people who truly know you"¹⁵.

In the comments, one line was translated into Chinese countless times: "Even my family doesn't know how to comfort me."

That was three years after the flag incident — the first time she spoke in public, in first person, about "not being happy." She mentioned nothing specific, offered no explanation, no complaints, no accusations. But she let everyone who read that passage know: she had not had it easy.

In the years that followed, TWICE grew bigger, and Tzuyu became harder to find. In 2020 she released the personal photo book Yes, I am Tzuyu. — the first TWICE member to release a solo photo book⁵. In May 2022, all TWICE members launched personal Instagram accounts; Tzuyu's is @thinkaboutzu. In March 2023, the account surpassed 10 million followers, making her the second most-followed Taiwanese artist on Instagram — behind only Jay Chou¹⁶.

Did you know?
In December 2024, at Fusing Elementary School in Tainan's East District, at the school's 30th anniversary celebration introducing distinguished alumni, something Tzuyu had never mentioned was inadvertently revealed: she had already earned a Master of Applied Psychology from Universidad Camilo José Cela in Spain⁶. She had never attended university. The school accepted her extensive work experience in lieu of an undergraduate degree; during the pandemic, recommended by a university professor she knew, she completed 8 online courses plus a thesis over the course of about a year¹⁷. She held no press conference, posted no stories, didn't even mention it on Instagram. The school posted about it on their own.

On September 6, 2024, she finally had her own solo EP, abouTZU — the name combining "about" and "TZU." The lead single "Run Away" surpassed 4 million YouTube views within 24 hours of the MV's release, reaching number one on both Korea's Bugs chart and Taiwan's iTunes chart¹⁸. But in interviews she gave no explanation of why the song was called "Run Away" — no explanation of what she was running from, or where she was running to.

She released it, danced, and then fell silent again.

Ten Years, and a Letter

October 20, 2015: TWICE debuted.

November 22, 2025 — exactly ten years and one month later — TWICE held their first Taiwan concert. Venue: Kaohsiung National Stadium, 55,000 capacity, two nights, a total of 110,000 attendees¹⁹. This was Tzuyu's first time on a stage in her own home country since her debut ten years earlier.

Before the show started, she brought out a handwritten page — physically similar to the page she had held on January 15, 2016, but with entirely different content. She read it aloud to the 55,000, her voice breaking throughout:

✦ "But in times when everything seemed to be going well on the outside, I sometimes felt empty and helpless. I tried hard to do my best, but gradually lost the feeling for it, and there were often moments when I missed home. That flame I once carried had grown very small — so small that I began to wonder whether I belonged here. But I didn't leave — not because I was obedient or compliant, but because I truly wanted and longed to stay. I knew that flame had never gone out, and so I was willing to keep watering my own seed."²⁰

The 55,000 wept with her. Even Korean leader Dahyun said in Chinese: "We finally got to hold a concert in our pride Tzuyu's hometown!"¹⁹

Nine years earlier those 90 seconds were read from someone else's script; these 90 seconds were read from her own. Nine years earlier the page said "I am Chinese"; this page said "I didn't leave, because I longed to stay." The same woman, the same gesture — standing and reading from a page — two completely opposite selves.

Nine months later, from March 20–22, 2026, TWICE held three concerts at Taipei's Big Dome. Three days, 120,000 attendees; on March 21, Taipei's MRT recorded 2.606 million passenger trips in a single day — a historical record for that month²¹. She stood at the center of the Big Dome. And wept again.

Two Silences, One Longing

Tzuyu's life contains two kinds of silence.

The first was those 90 seconds on January 15, 2016, reading words written by someone else — a silence where her mouth moved but the words were not her own.

The second was the nine years that followed, in which she never opened her mouth about those 90 seconds — a silence she chose. No "clarification," no "apology for the apology," no "the real me is actually," no interview about identity. She just kept dancing, kept releasing albums, kept going back to Fusing Elementary to accept a distinguished alumni award, kept posting pictures of her dog on Instagram. Her entire family said "I don't talk about political matters."

But beneath these two silences, the handwritten letter she read in Kaohsiung on November 22, 2025 revealed a third layer: longing. She didn't leave because she was obedient or compliant — she truly wanted and longed to stay. She was never a passive recipient of circumstances; she was someone who chose to keep watering her seed.

Curator's Note
Tsai Ing-wen's line "no one should have to apologize for their identity" became one of the most-quoted victory speeches of the decade because it presumed a deeply painful fact: before that night, Taiwanese people had taken for granted that "apologizing for your identity" was something that wouldn't happen. Until a 16-year-old girl proved it could.

And what Tzuyu's ten years told us is something else: some voices are not delivered through words. Her silence was not emptiness — it was the accumulation of a Taiwanese girl going from 16 to 26, rising at 4 a.m. for training every day, writing her graduate thesis in Korean, re-recording in the studio over and over until satisfied, and drawing that bow at the idol athletics championships.

The 1.34 million Taiwanese people who had never planned to vote went to the polls on the morning of January 16 — not because Tzuyu took a political stance for them. It was because when they saw a 16-year-old Taiwanese girl being forced to take a stance for someone else, they could no longer pretend they hadn't seen it.

Her entire family says "I don't talk about political matters." But her existence — from those 8 seconds with the flag onward — has never been only "hers." She is the girl from Tainan who left home at 13, who wrote her master's thesis in Korean, whose hair got caught in a bowstring as she drew a bow. She is also the political symbol that made Tsai Ing-wen have to say that night: "No one should have to apologize for their identity." She doesn't choose which one she is. She has no way of choosing. She just keeps watering.

And this island, after the night of January 15, learned how to finish the words — on behalf of those who had no way of finishing them themselves.

Further Reading

• Tsai Ing-wen — The January 16, 2016 victory speech "no one should have to apologize for their identity" was a direct response to those 90 seconds
• Jay Chou — Beyond Tzuyu's 10-million Instagram followers, the only Taiwanese artist ranked higher
• Taiwan Democratization — The 2016 election was Taiwan's third party rotation, and those 90 seconds were the weightiest moment in it
• Tai Tzu-ying — Another Tainan girl of the same generation who left home at 13 to fight for her dreams

References